Reform discourse recast women’s domestic power as backwardness to be disciplined by the state

Evidence

Writings of this kind sought to isolate women as the locus of the country’s backwardness. They were the holders of a power that was to be broken up by the new policies of the state, transformed into a means of social and political discipline. The family was to be organised as this house of discipline, which would then be able to produce, alongside the schools, the military and the other practices I have mentioned, the proper ‘mentality’ of the Egyptian – upon which the very possibility of a social order was understood to depend. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 365

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Liberal reforms add expectations without removing the demand to be feminine — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 692; Colonial reform discourse re-encoded Indian women’s practices as criminal categories. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2029; State women’s conventions elevated ordinary, previously unknown rural and urban women into public roles — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 364